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Student/Institution:
Robert C. Miller, Carnegie Mellon University
Faculty Advisor:
Brad A. Myers, Senior Research Scientist,
Human Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science
Grant:
Funded $19,800 on 9/1/00
Funded $18,300 on 7/1/99
Funded $17,700 on 7/1/98
Project:
Lightweight Structured Text Processing
Examples of structured text abound -- Web pages, email messages,
bibliographies, address lists, source code. In fact, almost all text
has some structure. Text editors recognize this fact to some extent by
providing operations on characters, words, lines, and paragraphs, but
extending this set to include user-defined objects like titles,
authors, university course numbers, and variable identifiers is not an
easy task. Lightweight Structured Text Editing (LSTE) solves this
problem by enabling the user to define and manipulate text structure
interactively. With an LSTE system, users can search, filter, sort,
edit, and reformat semi-structured documents and document
collections. Key contributions include a pattern language that is
simple and usable, robust pattern matching that degrades gracefully in
the face of irregular syntax, and a graphical interface that helps the
user discover and correct mismatches.
Current status: September 2001
LAPIS has been extended with two powerful new features:
- Simultaneous editing, a technique for automating repetitive text edits interactively. Simultaneous editing can do virtually anything that a recorded keyboard macro can, but lightweight structure knowledge makes it far easier to edit structured text like HTML or Java source code. More details can be found in our USENIX 2001 paper, Interactive Simultaneous Editing of Multiple Text Regions.
- Outlier finding, which helps find bugs in text-matching patterns by bringing unusual matches to the user's attention. More details are in
an upcoming UIST '01 paper, Outlier Finding: Focusing User Attention on Possible Errors
LAPIS is open source and written in Java. It is freely available for download from our
website.
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